Audio recordings produced by George Miller of podularity.com
Additional video interview with Ziauddin Sardar
Our podcast host George Miller visited Muslim intellectual and writer Zia Sardar at home in London last month to talk to him about his latest book, 'Balti Britain: A provocative Journey through Asian Britain'. After recording the audio interview (see podcast above), George recorded this short film in which Zia explains why he chose the example of the balti to open the book.
An examination of British Asian identity which traces the history of Asians in the UK.
Sardar travels to Asian communities throughout the UK to tell the history of Asians in Britain - from the arrival of the first Indian in 1614, to the young extremists in Walthamstow mosque in 2006. He interweaves throughout an illuminating account of his own life, describing his carefree childhood in Pakistan, his family's emigration to racist 1950s Britain, and his adulthood straddling two cultures. Along the way he asks: are arranged marriages a good thing? Does the term 'Asian' obscure more than it conveys? Do Vindaloo and Balti actually exist? And is multiculturalism an impossible dream?
'Energetic and accessible, Balti Britain is a powerful evocation of both the profundity and the myopia of the relationship between South Asia and Albion' Independent 'An erudite and entertaining book and it is its core contention that resonates profoundly: that Asians are not newcomers to Britain or foreigners to be accommodated and tolerated. Rather, the histories of Britain and the subcontinent are so intertwined through the experience of Empire and colonialism that British Asians are in fact direct products of this centuries-old encounter' The Times 'Sardar's engrossing, provocative book takes him and his readers on a journey - sometimes personal, always political - In the process, it reveals what he believes is the concealed history of the long relationship between Britain and India, Pakistan and Bangladesh' Metro 'An ambitious and provocative book that deserves to be read as the first draft of the history of Asians in Britain today' Observer "Deftly spiced and meaty concoctions that leave a largely positive taste in the mouth' Independent Biography and Memoirs Christmas Round Up. 'The great achievement of this book is to bring this is to bring this remarkable history to life with a novelist's sense of character - [A] clear-headed examination of multicultural Britain' Financial Times
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